2017 Prize

The Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology was awarded for the third time on 5 September, 2017 during the Annual Meeting of the European Meteorological Society in Dublin, Ireland. Harry Otten announced the winner, Lee Chapman, Professor at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK, for his idea High-Resolution Monitoring of Weather Impacts on Infrastructure Networks. Chapman's idea is to use the "internet of things" and low-cost sensors to monitor the weather on a very dense network to improve short-range forecasting. Chapman illustrated his idea with three examples: WinterSense, AutumnSense, and SummerSense.

WinterSense is an idea to reduce the amount of salt and other corrosive materials put on roads during icy conditions by using high-resolution forecasts that pinpoint where ice is actually occurring or likely to occur. By improving monitoring and forecasting of road icing conditions, Chapman hopes to save £100m per year in the U.K. as well as reduce the amount of corrosive chemicals put on highways by avoiding dispersing these chemicals unnecessarily.

AutumnSense is an idea to use leaf wetness sensors on railway tracks to monitor the occurrence of slippery wet leaves on the tracks. Wet leaves on the track accompanied by a small amount of moisture compact and create a Teflon-type coating on the top of the track, which can degrade braking performance, which in turn can cause delays due to platform over-runs and worse still, signals passed at dangerous locations.

SummerSense is an idea to better monitor extreme heat conditions on railway tracks, which can cause buckling of the tracks and failure of lineside equipment through overheating. In the U.K. Network Rail already has a range of weather monitoring equipment and temperature solutions on the railway network, however, this network is too coarse for the application outlined and there is a need to fill gaps with cheaper alternatives.

Chapman's idea is to use the internet of things (IoT), with "things" being small, low-cost sensors, to monitor and report in real time over the internet hazardous conditions such as those described above. The IoT approach can significantly reduce the costs by providing low-cost, low-power sensors embedded in an existing communications mesh.

The winner of the prize was selected by the Board of the Harry Otten Foundation out of three finalists. The other two participants in the final round received 2500 Euro for the following ideas:

Tom de Ruijter, a computer scientist at Big Data Republic in the Netherlands, for his innovative idea:Making use of errors in consumer weather data to derive advanced weather parameters. De Ruijter proposed to use errors in ground surface measurements to derive information about meteorological conditions such as nighttime cloud cover and snow vs. rain conditions.

Gert-Jan Steeneveld and Sytse Koopmans, Wageningen University in the Netherlands for their idea CrowDat@ssimilation: Assimilation of crowdsourced meteorological data in NWP models to improve small-scale weather forecasts. The basis of this idea is to use crowdsourced data in high-resolution numerical weather forecast models to improve short-range forecasts.

2015 Prize

The Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology was awarded for the second time on 8 September, 2015 during the Annual Meeting of the European Meteorological Society in Sofia, Bulgaria. Harry Otten announced that the Board of the Harry Otten Foundation had selected Olivier Boucher as the winner of the 2015 prize of 25 thousand Euro for his idea “Probing the Upper Atmosphere by watching aircraft.”

Boucher’s winning idea is to use a simple all-sky camera to observe condensation trails from aircraft, those long clouds that sometimes form behind flying planes. This detection can be greatly facilitated if you know where to look for them, using an aircraft message receiver that gives the location of all aircraft flying above the receiver.

The camera measures the width and length of the contrails and their changes over time. These images provide valuable information about humidity and wind that can be used to improve numerical weather model forecasts. Such information, which will be taken mostly in clear air, will complement information from satellite observations of clouds and their motion.

This proposal was evaluated as scientifically sound, technically feasible and highly innovative. Its potential to improve the quality of global weather forecasts would benefit all users of weather forecasts.

Olivier is a research director of the French Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique since 2011, after spending 6 years with the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom.

The winner of the prize has been selected out of three finalists. The other two participants in the final round received 2500 Euro for the following ideas:

Rogiros Tapakis and Alexandros Charalambides (Cyprus University of Technology) for their idea to use a solar measurements from a dense network of photovoltaic cells to help electrical power generation companies manage the balance of sources of power.

Overall the jury received 13 applications for the prize from different European countries, Israel, and Cuba. The Harry Otten Prize is awarded every two years. More information is available at the website at www.harry-otten-prize.org.

Richard Anthes, Chairman of the Board of the Harry Otten Foundation, said “the finalists for this round of the Harry Otten Prize contributed outstanding examples of innovative ideas that have the potential for applications to benefit society.”

Harry Otten, founder of the Harry Otten Foundation, added “I am delighted that the prize has been awarded for such an innovative proposal. Using photographs from the condensation trails from aircraft can bring in new and valuable information to improve global weather forecasts, which will benefit all societies in the world.”

2013 Prize

The Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology was awarded for the first time during the Annual Meeting of the European Meteorological Society in Reading (UK) on September 11, 2013. Harry Otten announced that the jury has decided that Karolina Stanisławska with her idea “Social media for meteorological prediction and information” won the prize, which is endowed with 25,000 Euro.

The idea “Social media for meteorological prediction and information” proposed by Karolina Stanisławska is about constructing a meteorological system based on the information extracted exclusively from social media content. The system would be a service providing crowdsourced information about actual weather conditions, identification of hazardous weather events and reaction of people to weather information.

Karolina was born in Poland and graduated in computer science at the Poznań University of Technology in 2011. She currently works as a researcher in climate modelling and greenhouse gases topics for the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki.

The winner of the prize was selected from three finalists. The other two finalists received 2,500 Euro for the following ideas:

The “Global Weather Alliance - the WeatherShare service - wxshare.org” by Karl H. Eggestad is a free and open video and audio clip and image material service speciﬁcally targeted for the worldwide weather broadcasting community.

“Forecasting and Mapping Ice Thickness for Ice Skating on Natural Lakes and Canals” by Gert-Jan Steeneveld, Bert Heusinkveld and Kevin Damman aims at improving the quantitative forecasting of ice growth and communicating this in a fast way to the general public.

Overall the jury received 19 applications for the prize mainly from different European countries and the USA. The Harry Otten Prize is awarded every two years.

Hans Reiff, Chairman of the jury: “Karolina’s idea is highly innovative with significant potential benefits to society. These benefits include both use of people to provide weather data and information to meteorologists through the social media as well as information on how society reacts to weather information and forecasts from meteorologists.“

Harry Otten, Founder of the Harry Otten Foundation: “I am delighted that the Prize has been awarded to such an innovative proposal. I hope that the Prize helps to put her idea into practice.”

2012 Prize Round

Even though it was the first round of the prize, a total of 12 applications was received. However, in the opinion of the jury, no application fulfilled all the criteria to win the prize.

The jury decided to issue honorable mention awards to two applications though, and granted 500 Euro to each of the authors:

Ms. Ahafianyo is working for the Ghanian Meteorological Agency. She noticed that weather and climate information is not always fully recognized in Ghana, especially by farmers who would need them most. She therefore proposed to educate through television and by publishing a weather calendar which explains the climate of each month in the different regions of Ghana. Additionally lessons in schools are part of the program she brought forward.

Martijn Koomen: Weather, Feathers and Frost

Mr. Koomen is a graduate from the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL). He proposed to built a piece of art to visualize wind by feathers being kept between two glasses.

EMS Annual Meeting 2017-Awards Ceremony

Members of the Harry Otten Foundation Board in front of the Helix in Dublin. Left to right: Dominique Marbouty, Leo Kroon, David Burridge, Tanja Cegnar, Richard Anthes, Dennis Schulze and Andrea Oestreich (secretary).